It was the afternoon of January 5 when retired angler Colin LeGrand of Winnipeg, and his fishing buddy Rick Gergatz moved their “SnoBear” ice fishing machine into shallow water looking for walleyes. The wind chill was 20 below zero.
“We’d caught a few walleyes that morning and moved our SnoBear from deep water to shallow water of about 9-feet,” LeGrand tells Wired2fish.
A SnoBear is a specially-designed tracked vehicle for ice fishing that runs on frozen lakes and snow. It’s a self-contained, mobile shelter for ice fishing, featuring a heated cabin, built-in fishing holes with portholes, hydraulics to lower its body onto the ice, and advanced electronics like GPS and fish finders, allowing anglers to comfortably fish in winter conditions without leaving their vehicle.
LeGrand says they accessed the lake with their specialty vehicle near a place called Sandy Beach. It’s at the southwest corner of the lake near the village of Riverton. The lake is frozen solid and plenty safe to drive even large, RV-type vehicles like a SnoBear onto it.
“I marked a fish deep on our Garmin fathometer, so I dropped a pink ‘Element’ custom plug down toward it,” said LeGrand. “But before that fish could react to my rattling plug, a bigger fish slammed my lure.”
LeGrand says he knew right away it was a big northern pike by the way it fought. He only had 8-pound test line with no heavier leader, so he played the fish carefully.
“It made two different runs that almost ‘spooled’ me,” said the 68-year-old native Manitoba angler. “I played the fish slowly and carefully until I got it up near the ice hole I was fishing through.”
But when the pike came topside it got wrapped on the Garmin transducer cable that was below a different hole in the ice. The fish pulled so hard the Garmin nearly got pulled through the second hole. But they grabbed the fishfinder and hauled the pike with the cable and line through the second hole and onto the ice inside the SnoBear.
They were stunned at the size of the pike, which they measured at 45-inches in length. Its weight was estimated at a minimum of 20 pounds, and LeGrand says it could be 25 years old. After some photos of the pike they released it back through the ice and into 9,500-square mile Lake Winnipeg.
LeGrand has applied for a Manitoba “Master Angler Award” in well-deserved recognition of his huge pike.
“That pike is bigger than my granddaughter,” he said. “And I’m glad it’s back in the lake so someone else may enjoy catching it one day.”
